Trouble with 32 bit Gtk app on 64 bit system - no or misleading error msgs

[Stéphane Graber]

On Sun, 2010-03-14 at 23:40 +0100, Thomas Tempelmann wrote:
> Hi there,
> this is my first post. I've signed up here because I have a particular
> problem I like to discuss with the developers.
> 
> I'm a long-time software developer, although I'm not a big fan of Unix and
> derivates. I am mostly developing for OS X, and used to do for classic Mac
> OS, so I'm more of a autmatic tools user than a user of command line tools.
> 
> 
> Anyway. I've created a 32 bit application that uses Gtk 2, which launches
> fine on the 32 Bit Ubuntu 9.10 default installation.
> 
> But when I launch the same app on the 64 bit Ubuntu version, the following
> things happen:
> 
> 1.
>  When launching by double clicking it within the Explorer (sorry, haven't
> figured out the name of the UI desktop app yet), _nothing_ happens. Not even
> a error message popping up. This is, IMO, something that should be fixed,
> i.e. that the user needs to get some kind of response telling him that his
> attempt to launch the app was actually understood.
> 
> 2.
>  When launching it from the Terminal, the only message I get is "bash:
> ./appname: No such file or directory".
> 
> Now, this is a bad error message as well. The file exists and is executable.
> So, the error message should be something like "required lib .. not found"
> or "this executable has no code for this architecture" or whatever. But not
> a message saying "there is no file".
> 
> So, is there a chance that this gets fixed/improved without me actually
> having to do that (I won't, I've got other problems, thank you :) ?
> If so, where should I address this issue, or does this post already make it
> into the bug DB even, magically?
> 
> 
> BTW, I'm still stuck solving this problem, i.e. getting the right libs
> installed so that this app eventually launches (no, I can not build a 64 bit
> version of this app, just believe me), and so I installed, as a first step,
> the "ia32-libs". This, in fact, made the misleading error msg in Terminal go
> away, replaced by a similarly useless "segmentation fault" without any
> further info even in which context this happened, and again with no error
> msg when double clicking the app in Explorer. Any suggestions how I could
> get at least some more information so that I can figure out which other 32
> bit libs are missing?

Hi,

ldd <your binary>

Will at least give you the list of shared libraries that your binary is
using an if not present, tell you so.
I'd expect a 32-bit only program that's to run on 64bit to be
distributed in a static form to avoid issues like missing shared
libraries.

-- 
Stéphane Graber
Ubuntu developer
http://www.ubuntu.com
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 198 bytes
Desc: This is a digitally signed message part
URL: <https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-devel-discuss/attachments/20100314/d8111497/attachment.sig>